Abstract

As technological advances continue to be made, the demand for more efficient distributed multimedia systems is also affirmed. Current support for end-to-end QoS is still limited; consequently mechanisms are required to provide flexibility in resource loading. One such mechanism, caching, may be introduced both in the end-system and network to facilitate intelligent load balancing and resource management. This paper introduces new work at Lancaster University investigating the use of transparent network caches for MPEG-2. A novel architecture is proposed, based on router-based caching and the employment of large scale dynamic RAM as the sole caching medium. Finally, the architecture also proposes the use of the ISO/IEC standardised DSM-CC protocol as a basic control infrastructure and the caching of pre-built transport packets (UDP/IP) in the data plane. The work presented in this paper is in its infancy and consequently focuses upon the design and implementation of the caching architecture rather than an investigation into performance gains, which we intend to report in future publications.